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拍品专文
This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax Notice in the back of the catalogue.
The exuberant Vache tachetée is one of the earliest and most iconic pictures in Dubuffet's Cow series. It is filled with energy, with the pulse of life itself, and shows Dubuffet's amused fascination with heavy, ponderous nature of the bovine form.
Cows are featured in several of Dubuffet's earlier works, especially those from the beginning of the 1940s showing agricultural themes but, like almost all other country motifs, they had disappeared from his work. However, in 1954, Dubuffet's wife Lili was placed in a sanitorium away from Paris in order to recuperate from tuberculosis. Writing about this tense period in his life, Dubuffet recalled: 'From the beginning of July 1954, as my wife, for reasons of health, was living on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, I often had occasion to drive along the road between Paris and Auvergne, and to take long solitary walks in the countryside around the village where she was being cared for. In this village I had at my disposal a little place which I fitted up as a studio. Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects - fields, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields - all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944. As formerly, I loved spending hours watching the cows and afterwards drawing them from memory, or even, but much more rarely, from life... The sight of this animal gives me an inexhaustible sense of well-being because of the atmosphere of calm and serenity it seems to generate' (J. Dubuffet, "Vaches, Herbe, Frondaisons," pp. 96-103 in P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York, 1962, pp. 96-103).
Vache tachetée, as one of the earlier works from the series, has a very different character from many of the later paintings of cows which are often more garish and had an increasingly cartoon-like appearance. By contract, Vache tachetée is a looming and vital presence on canvas. Dubuffet has painted the cow in earth tones. This use of a familiar palette to present both the cow and the country links the animal inherently ot the pasture in whcih it is grazing. In Vache tachetée, Dubuffet has harnessed the actual countryside, as though he has painted not with oils but with the very stuff of nature.
Dubuffet captures the creature's essence and the well-being that they so subtly exude. To do this, he tended to paint from memorty rather than from his subject, believing that recollections are more sensual, and therefore more true, than the cold and direct analysis of the eye. Vache tachetée is a monumental presence on the canvas. He has adjusted the scale and shape of the animal in his memory and through subjective vision and experience has made the cow even more immediate: 'It is a very curious fact that people who are passionately attached to something, say for example to an animal, would not be able to give you any of the animal's exact measurements or else would give incredibly wrong ones, the way children draw from memory objects that are very familiar to them or that have made a deep impression on them. So, it seems to me, that to set oneself to inventory the true measurements of things is a practice without the slightest value. What to me seems interesting is to recover in the representation of an object the whole complex set of impressions we receive as we see it in everyday life, the manner in which it has touched our sensibility, and the forms it assumes in our memory' (Dubuffet, quoted in Selz, op.cit., 1962, p. 97).
Figs:
Jean Dubuffet, Vache (aux taches déchiquetées), 1954 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Jean Dubuffet, Vache et éleveur, 1943.
The exuberant Vache tachetée is one of the earliest and most iconic pictures in Dubuffet's Cow series. It is filled with energy, with the pulse of life itself, and shows Dubuffet's amused fascination with heavy, ponderous nature of the bovine form.
Cows are featured in several of Dubuffet's earlier works, especially those from the beginning of the 1940s showing agricultural themes but, like almost all other country motifs, they had disappeared from his work. However, in 1954, Dubuffet's wife Lili was placed in a sanitorium away from Paris in order to recuperate from tuberculosis. Writing about this tense period in his life, Dubuffet recalled: 'From the beginning of July 1954, as my wife, for reasons of health, was living on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, I often had occasion to drive along the road between Paris and Auvergne, and to take long solitary walks in the countryside around the village where she was being cared for. In this village I had at my disposal a little place which I fitted up as a studio. Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects - fields, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields - all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944. As formerly, I loved spending hours watching the cows and afterwards drawing them from memory, or even, but much more rarely, from life... The sight of this animal gives me an inexhaustible sense of well-being because of the atmosphere of calm and serenity it seems to generate' (J. Dubuffet, "Vaches, Herbe, Frondaisons," pp. 96-103 in P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York, 1962, pp. 96-103).
Vache tachetée, as one of the earlier works from the series, has a very different character from many of the later paintings of cows which are often more garish and had an increasingly cartoon-like appearance. By contract, Vache tachetée is a looming and vital presence on canvas. Dubuffet has painted the cow in earth tones. This use of a familiar palette to present both the cow and the country links the animal inherently ot the pasture in whcih it is grazing. In Vache tachetée, Dubuffet has harnessed the actual countryside, as though he has painted not with oils but with the very stuff of nature.
Dubuffet captures the creature's essence and the well-being that they so subtly exude. To do this, he tended to paint from memorty rather than from his subject, believing that recollections are more sensual, and therefore more true, than the cold and direct analysis of the eye. Vache tachetée is a monumental presence on the canvas. He has adjusted the scale and shape of the animal in his memory and through subjective vision and experience has made the cow even more immediate: 'It is a very curious fact that people who are passionately attached to something, say for example to an animal, would not be able to give you any of the animal's exact measurements or else would give incredibly wrong ones, the way children draw from memory objects that are very familiar to them or that have made a deep impression on them. So, it seems to me, that to set oneself to inventory the true measurements of things is a practice without the slightest value. What to me seems interesting is to recover in the representation of an object the whole complex set of impressions we receive as we see it in everyday life, the manner in which it has touched our sensibility, and the forms it assumes in our memory' (Dubuffet, quoted in Selz, op.cit., 1962, p. 97).
Figs:
Jean Dubuffet, Vache (aux taches déchiquetées), 1954 Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Jean Dubuffet, Vache et éleveur, 1943.